An Informed and Active Citizenry is Essential to a Healthy Democracy

May 21, 2018

I hope to earn your support as I seek re-election to council this fall. The civic election is on Oct 20th.

Serving on Kamloops city council for almost 10 years has been the honour of my life. I love this community with all my heart and I am incredibly thankful that the community has provided me with this amazing opportunity to serve.

In my time on council, I’ve worked on a great diversity of issues. I feel very well versed in community opportunities, concerns, and issues in Kamloops.

Specifically, in this term of council, highlights include:

helping connect the local technology industry more closely with city hall

In May of 2017, when Mayor Milobar was elected to the provincial legislature, I was honoured by my council colleague’s unanimous support to become the Acting Mayor until Mayor Christian was sworn in early October. This was an incredible experience for me and I learned even more about city hall operations. I helped lead the community through our wildfire response and the final steps of our decisionmaking on the Ajax mine proposal.

On a provincial level, I am currently the First VP of the Union of BC Municipalities and President of BC’s Local Government Leadership Academy. I try to bring as much of my provincial learnings and relationships as I can to my work in Kamloops.

I strive to take a very positive and constructive approach to my council work. We definitely have challenges but the way to address these challenges is to focus on our strengths and opportunities.

I strive to be a councillor everyone can feel comfortable with and to be a councillor who brings our wonderfully diverse community together over issues and initiatives.

I aim to thoroughly research and engage the community on issues. And, once I’ve made decisions, I commit to clearly explaining the reasoning behind my decisions.

I hope you will consider actively supporting the campaign. I am hoping this will be our campaign, not just my campaign.

Thank you so much for being part of what Kamloops an awesome place. Please be in touch anytime.

Election platforms should mean something. In each of my 4 previous city council campaigns, I have produced some type of platform document. I always keep my 2014 platform one pager handy and it's always been readily accessible from the top menu bar on this website. And below is an image of the platform in its entirety. I feel pretty good about keep this commitments over the past three and and half years of this term. And there is at least one commitment that I feel I haven't worked on enough yet. Under the "Healthy, Socially Responsible Community", I haven't really worked too much on exploring a recreation centre for active aging seniors. I don't feel good about this.

I do feel good about the work I have contributed to on the rest of my platform commitments. I would certainly want to hear from folks who might think I didn't do enough work. I'll spend time over the next months detailing here the work done on each of the commitments.

As I work to earn community support for reelection again, I would love your feedback on what might be included in my 2018 platform.

February 07, 2018

About 125 Kamloops citizens participated in the first Kamloops Idea Festival in 2013. We came together to learn about and engage in dialogue over a broad range of community initiatives and issues. Feedback was quite positive.

I committed to hold another Idea Festival in my civic election platform in 2014. The focus here will be on climate action. I view this as a critical conversation and believe strongly that a diverse range of citizens and community organizations need to be involved in this conversation.

The goal of the 2018 Idea Festival is to help to start crafting community consensus on climate action activities in Kamloops.

The festival will go for three hours and will consist of:

Short “lightning” talks about climate action from a variety of very interesting perspectives. We will strive to nclude perspectives not often heard in discussions on climate action.

Small group dialogues on various facets of climate action. We will be asking event registrants for suggestions for small group topics.

Short artistic performances between different event activities.

We hope to offer another opportunity for a diverse range of citizens to get to know each other and to have fun thinking more deeply about our community.

Tha 2018 Kamloops Idea Festival will be held from 9am to 12pm at the Rex Hall, 417 Seymour Street, downtown Kamloops. A light mid morning breakfast will be provided.

November 09, 2017

As a member of the downtown parking solutions working group and someone who has long advocated for evidence based parking strategies in Kamloops, I know many might be wondering why I voted against the downtown parking study proposed by city staff at the Nov 7th 2017 council meeting. I know my friend and Kamloops Central Business Improvement Association (KCBIA) President Mike O’Reilly, for one, was extremely disappointed.

I owe Mike and many others an explanation for my vote.

First, in my experience on council, while we definitely talk about alternative transportation and have invested greatly in transit, parking issues seem to get more priority. I feel this needs to change. I think parking is very important but it has to be seen in the larger context of all the different modes of transportation downtown. We need to minimize, to the greatest extent possible, the amount of people driving to, from, or within downtown in a single occupancy vehicle. This has many benefits - environmental, health, and economic. This also is really a challenging cultural shift to make.

We need to have evidence based information on parking but we also, critically, have to work to engage people in the conversation of alternatives to driving or driving alone. I didn’t see that reflected enough in the parking study proposal presented.

Second, the $100 000 ceiling for the parking study seemed really high to me. The “on the ground” work here is relatively basic. The larger expenditure seemed to be related to the coordination of the work. I understand the money for the study does not come from tax dollars but comes from parking fees collected. I still think we could do this study for less money. I want to state that I might be missing something. Maybe I needed to see more detail as to the workplan and tasks involved in a $100 000 parking study.

So, where does this leave the quest for an evidence based downtown parking study. I think we need to ensure we take a more coordinated approach and that we communicate that to the community. I also feel we should look at lesser cost options for the study. I really need to understand the reasons behind the costs. I think this exercise would get me to a place where funding the study would gain my support.

September 11, 2017

I had a awesome summer job this year. I was your Mayor. Actually, I will serve as acting Mayor until mid October when the new Mayor and Councillors, elected in the Sept 30th by-election, are sworn in.

I’m humbled my council colleagues asked me to take on this caretaker role and very thankful for their support and the support of city staff. It’s been a very interesting summer.

I was in Ottawa at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference on June 1st, my first day as the full time acting Mayor. One interesting takeaway was the Prime Minister’s announcement of Smart Cities challenge.

Full details are still to come but I am hoping Kamloops will compete for a $10 million dollar prize that will showcase our amazing local innovation, technology and ideas.

June was also a month of significant anniversaries. The weekly Pit Stop community dinner for people experiencing the effects of poverty celebrated 20 years of service. Our local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion celebrated an incredible 90 years.

In July, after more than six years of review, City Council took a position opposing the Ajax Mine proposal. The vote was 5-1. It would have been 6-1 if former Councillor Ken Christian had not resigned before the vote to run for Mayor.

The vote, in my view, reflects council’s overall assessment that this specific mine proposal presents a substantial risk of negative impact to the health and economic wellbring of Kamloops citizens.

Council supports economic development in many different ways. I hope those who support and those who oppose Ajax might be able to unite behind other big projects in the community. Ajax is decidely not the only egg in our basket.

July was also the start of a very bad wildfire season. On July 8th, we had the most fire starts on one day in recorded history. Starting with Cache Creek, Kamloops hosted people from many communities who were evacuated from their homes.

I have never been more proud to represent Kamloops than during our time as an evacuation centre. Kamloopsians stepped up in so many different ways. Our already incredible formal emergency support services staff and volunteers were supplemented with so many new volunteers.

In fact, one of the biggest challenges during the peak of the wildfires was trying to coordinate all the offers of support and assistance. I was very proud to talk of the generosity of Kamloopsians in local, provincial, and national media interviews.

In late July and into August, we got hit with smoke from the Elephant Hill fire to our northwest and our air quality was compromised. Going on the BC Air Quality Health Index website and seeing Kamloops having the worst air quality in the province was not fun.

Later in August, we have been working to bring down a spike in negative impacts from street drug use. There have, for example, been a large increase in the number of discarded needles left in public spaces.

We need to do better in supporting people living with serious addictions. And we also need to reduce the negative impacts of their behaviours on others.

Thus, in the past ten years, the city has encouraged a coordinated, holistic approach to these social issues. This spike in impacts can sometimes strain our coordinated work, as different stakeholders start getting pressure to just do something. The coordinated approach, however, is the key to lasting success.

July 17, 2017

Today, at city council, we made the decision to oppose the Ajax mine proposal. Here is my statement as to why I came to a difficult decision to oppose. :

With the wildfires around us, I’ve spent some time in our evacuee reception centres over the past week. Everybody is coming together at these centres. The Ajax polarization of opinion largely disappears. This, to me, is Kamloops at its best. Kamloopsians coming together from all walks of life to help our neighbours.

On Ajax, the sides have become very entrenched and I think we need to remember that the vast majority of people on both sides of the proposal are good people with good intentions and legitimate ideas and concerns. I urge people to see the good and the legitimate in those with a different view. We need to retain our ability to come together. I truly believe there is much more that unites us than divides us.

I have found my dealings with key proponents and opponents of the proposal to be generally respectful and thoughtful.

This not about a generally alway supporting industry or generally always opposing industry. We need to assess each proposal case by case.

From very early on, I have been guided by a few key principles in my assessment of the Ajax proposal:

I should base my assessment on the best available information is available about the proposal, both in terms of the final environmental application by the mining company and expert reviews of this application.

I should assess the net impact of the mine taking into consideration the proposed benefits and the anticipated challenges. I set a very high bar for my support.

I have talked about these principles often in my discussions and my public statements on Ajax.

In my experience, KGHM has been a great company to deal with. I know the staff at KGHM have been incredibly committed to proposing a safe, profitable operation. I also thank KGHM for its significant charitable contributions to the community.

I also know many Kamloops citizens strongly support Ajax for the economic and employment benefits it could bring. Some citizens have shared with me their feeling that Kamloops has a hard time “getting to yes” on major projects they feel would move the community forward.

My research and assessment leads me, however, to a difficult decision today not to support the Ajax proposal. There are five main reasons for my decision.

SSN decision : I think the SSN process of assessing the mine proposal was incredibly comprehensive and democratic. While I might differ with SSN’s stances from issue to issue, on an economic and land use decision as large as the Ajax, I think the lack of SSN support is a deal breaker. In the spirit of reconciliation, I stand with SSN on their position on the Ajax proposal.

Health impacts - Virtually every professional peer review of the Ajax proposal I have read has expressed significant uncertainty with Ajax plan to mitigate 90% of the fugitive dust from the site. As Ralph Adams, BC Ministry of Environment Air Quality Meteorologist states in a March 17th 2017 letter, “neither I nor my colleagues at Environment Canada agree that the study supplies adequate evidence that 90% dust mitigation can be maintained in the conditions expected at the proposed Ajax mine”

Even with 90% mitigation, the Ajax application outlines some increases in particulate matter for areas of upper Aberdeen. With the uncertainty around reaching 90%, the increases in particulate matter may be greater than forecast in the application. At the Ajax town hall in June 2017, Dr Kamran Golmohammadi stated “my professional opinion is that there will be episodes of significant increase in particulate matter”

These will have negative health impacts on some residents. SLR’s Dr Muttray confirmed that even short term exposure to PM 2.5 for people with already compromised respiratory systems (eg. those with Asthma) can have negative health impacts.

Dr Golmohammadi also stated that it is very difficult to assess the mental health impacts of anxiety among those very concerned about the mine. The uncertainty around mental health impacts is also a big concern for me.

Ajax would undoubtedly bring many jobs and a lot of economic activity to Kamloops and region. However, with our strong and diverse economy, in my view, these positives are outweighed by the negative health impacts. Kamloops economic success no longer rests on one project or one industry.

In saying this, we as a council need to continue to encourage good paying natural resource based jobs in Kamloops. And I commit to helping in any way I can with that effort.

Monitoring challenges: In his March 17th letter, Ralph Adams notes that a monitoring and migation “strategy carries risk. The strategy is based on the assumption that any issues that arise during the life of the mine could be resolved with additional mitigation meaures; however, there may be issues where no practical or economically feasible solution can be found.” He goes to state that “if the mine goes ahead the development of the monitoring and mitigation plans will be critical and are likely to require the most comprehensive, complex, and expensive monitoring systems that have been attempted for any mine in BC.”

With our local experience with provincial government challenges in monitoring the Owl Road landfill, i am skeptical that we can always rely on comprehensive, complex, and expensive monitoring systems to prevent or mitigate negative impact.The ownership structure of KGHM may also impact the long term stability of the company’s monitoring plans. KGHM largest shareholder is the Government of Poland. And when governments change in Poland, as happened in the past couple of years, there can be a change of philosophy that may result in less robust monitoring on the ground.

Potential loss of doctors: I don’t think all physicians in Kamloops oppose the Ajax proposal. Enough have, however, to cause me a significant concern about a loss of doctors in the community if the proposal is approved. At different Ajax townhalls, we have had neurologists, general practitioners, rehabilitation specialists, and pediatricians express their opposition.

Potential loss of community diversity and cohesion: The Ajax proposal has attracted a lot of significant support in the community. It also unfortunately has split the community in terms of support and opposition. If the proposal is approved, I fear that Kamloops will lose some of the diversity I treasure. I think major economic projects should bring the community together. KGHM, despite a significant effort, has not been able to achieve this.

July 10, 2017

These are personal experiences and observations about the recent incredible wildfire activity in BC. For current updates and info, please visit the TNRD website and the BC Government wildfire website.

On Friday, events moved incredibly rapidly. In a couple of hours, wildfires were starting to threaten communities across our region. The incredible first responder and emergency support services network started responding quickly and the folks involved were heroic in their efforts to assist evacuees and to battle the wildfires.

Another really amazing thing happened and it turned out to be a bit of a challenge. So many people started to offer help. Volunteers, donations - it was really amazing. It also was initially a bit overwhelming to the emergency support services. The first job is to register evacuees and set them up with housing and food. And the added task of coordinating the amazing generosity was challenging.

The coordination issues are now getting addressed. And we wait to see what the weather brings us over the next days.

June 01, 2017

Today, I start full time working as the deputy Mayor. I just want to thank council again for their unanimous support in appointing me. This is a an incredibly humbling honour. I am looking forward to serving the community in this role for the next four months. A by-election to elect a new Mayor and at least two councillors will be held by the end of September. And, then, I will be happy to return to my seat as a city councillor.

We will very much miss Mayor, now MLA, Peter Milobar and are hearts all go out to our dear colleague Councillor Marg Spina, who is resigning at the end of June to focus on her battle with cancer and to focus on her family. We will miss her dearly at city hall but support her in her decision 1000%.

I approach this job as a caretaker, to work with council, city staff, and the community to continue to forward council’s strategic plan, and to have as seamless as possible transition for the duties of the Mayor’s office. I have not been elected by citizens as Mayor and I will not be going in directions outside of our strategic plan, the normal duties that Peter had undertaken as Mayor, or independent of the approval of council as a whole. I ask you all to hold me accountable to these commitments I make to the community.

So, its really steady as she goes and maintaining the already existing momentum.

If there is anything I can do to serve you, please never hesitate to shoot me an email (asingh@kamloops.ca) or call my cell (250-320-6532).

April 25, 2017

There has been quite a robust debate over the past days on council's decision to start the process of demolishing the old Kamloops Daily News building to create some interim parking spaces downtown. I was on CBC Kamloops yesterday talking about this. There also some good clips of Councillor Denis Walsh, who opposes demolition. Thanks to Shelly Joyce for interviewing me and to Tara Copeland for setting the interview up. Here is the audio.